Friday, March 10, 2017

Virtual selector codebook example image

I'm going to post some examples over the next few days. Note these examples are not .basis compressed images, instead they are just ETC1 compressed images where each block's selectors have been replaced by the "best" corresponding virtual selector codebook entry. Each block was processed independently, using a brute force search on a 20 core workstation.

I used an 8-bit seed dictionary and 11-bits to control the amplification functions, so the virtual CB size was 512K entries. The seed dictionary and functions were tuned on the set of photos, test images, and textures used to tune crunch. My current implementation seems to work best on photos and textures, and worst on synthetic images and high-contrast text.

In .basis, this method is currently only used to compressed selector codebooks, not entire images, so a brute force search over the entire virtual codebook isn't too insane. Also, basis supports a hybrid codebook mode, so it can select between virtual VB entries and "raw" entries depending on quality.

About Me

Back in the day I worked for several years at Digital Illusions on things like the first shipping deferred shaded game ("Shrek" - 2001), software renderers, and game AI. Then, after working for Microsoft at Ensemble Studios for 5 years as engine lead on Halo Wars, I took a year off to create "crunch", an advanced DXTc texture compression library. I then worked 5 years at Valve, where I contributed to Portal 2, Dota 2, CS:GO, and the Linux versions of Valve's Source1 games. I was one of the original developers on the Steam Linux team, where I worked with a (somewhat enigmatic) multi-billionare on proving that OpenGL could still hold its own vs. Direct3D. I also started the vogl (Valve's OpenGL debugger) project from scratch, which I worked on for over a year. In my spare time I work on various open source lossless and texture compression projects: crunch, LZHAM, miniz, jpeg-compressor, and picojpeg.